THE CALCULATOR
What does the manual RFQ round actually cost?
A lane you can’t serve means five to ten agents asked, replies arriving in every format, chasers written by hand — while your customer’s enquiry cools. Set the sliders to your desk; the ledger on the right prices a year of it.
Context: no public benchmark exists for partner-to-partner RFQ response times — the shipper-side analogue ran ~90 hours in Freightos’ studies. Every line here is arithmetic on your own inputs; the cooling rate is yours to judge.
Watch a lane ranked liveWhy nobody can quote you a benchmark
No public benchmark exists for partner-to-partner RFQ response times — the category has simply never been measured. The nearest analogue is shipper-side: Freightos mystery-shopping found top forwarders averaging around 90 hours to quote (a shipper-facing figure, cited secondhand — treat it as directional). Until partner-side data exists, the only truth is what your own desk records.
The collation tax
Each round asks 5–10 agents per lane. One replies in a PDF, one in the email body, one on WhatsApp, two go quiet until chased. Someone re-keys it all into a spreadsheet, normalizes the currencies and validities, and hopes nothing was missed. That is the hours slider — pure labour that produces no rate, only the ability to compare rates.
Why evidence compounds
Every reply — its speed, its number, its follow-through — updates that partner's scorecard, so the next shortlist starts smarter than the last. The pattern shows up in adjacent data: WebCargo's analysis of its own platform found quotes within existing relationships winning at roughly double the rate of new ones (vendor analysis of its own data — weigh accordingly). The manual round pays its cost every time; the scored round pays it down.